Title: Seek And Ye Shall Find
1Seek And Ye Shall Find
- The Collected Wisdom Gleaned from the EdSeek
Project
Enlightenments of the Glaringly Obvious Only
After We Learned How Glaringly Obvious They Were.
2BREAK HERE
3(No Transcript)
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5Training Ground
Seekology Primary School Life on the Playground
- Eating your own dog food
- Try finding content on your own website in major
search engines - 1) School Lunch Menu
- shiloh lunch menu
- 2) CNC Router
- cnc router
6Shiloh School April 2002
7Shiloh School June 2002
ü
8Shiloh School Sept. 2003
Reality of the Real World
9How do spiders find pages
- robots or spiders follow links
- Follow standard html links
- DO NOT follow image maps, java animated menus,
etc. - Therefore you need standard links to all pages
in your site - Ideally include a SITEMAP.html file
- EdSeek.org functional sitemap
- www.shiloh.k12.il.us - main navigation menu
10Categorized How?
- The search engine software parses and reads all
TEXT in the page (script/comments ignored) - It assigns priorities to the words
- based on location in page
- Title, Header section, Body section
- based on number of times it is used
- based on proximity of requested words to each
other - Priority is given to Meta-Tags
11Description Meta-Tag Example
- lthtmlgt
- ltheadgt
- lttitlegtSmithsonian Institutionlt/titlegt
- ltmeta NAME"description" CONTENT"The Smithsonian
Institution is composed of sixteen museums and
galleries and the National Zoo and numerous
research facilities in the United States and
abroad."gt - lt/headgt
Smithsonian Institute
12Keyword Meta-Tag Example
- lthtmlgt
- ltheadgt
- lttitlegtIllinois Technology Conference for
Educators IL-TCElt/titlegt - ltmeta name"keywords" content"education,
educators, educational, youth, conference,
opportunities, improve, alternative, program,
training, equipment, illinois, technology, ideas,
schools"gt - lt/headgt
IL-TCE Conference - IL-EdTech
Conference
13Taking Controlling of which Pages are Indexed
- ROBOTS.TXT file
- Placed at root of Webserver
- Or start in any folder
14What is invisible to search engines?
- Images (use alt tags)
- Script (Java etc, some Image Maps)
- Comments/Scripts
- PDF DOC files are not easily indexed
- Dynamic generated pages from Databases
15School Website Model
16BREAK HERE
17Seekology 101 Introduction to Seekology
A Primer for Uber-Geeks, Alpha-Geeks, Neo-Geeks
and Non-Geeks Who Seek
18Enlightenment No. 1
Nothing is available on the global network (web)
unless someone puts it there.
19Enlightenment No. 2
If you put something on the global network and
dont tell anyone that its there, it might as
well not be on the global network.
20Enlightenment No. 3
The most fundamental unit of information on the
global network is the file.
21Enlightenment No. 4
The most fundamental method of accessing the most
fundamental unit of information is the hypertext
link.
22Enlightenment No. 5
Humans access units of information by following
hypertext links using a process colloquially
called clicking.
23Enlightenment No. 6
Web servers are software programs designed to
listen and respond to requests for files (clicks)
from clients on the global network.
24Enlightenment No. 7
If it cannot be clicked, it probably cannot be
located by the average human user, unless one
knows the exact location (URL or address).
25Enlightenment No. 8
Search engines consist of 2 separate software
programs crawlers and indexers
26Enlightenment No. 9
Crawling is done by software programs called
robots (aka spiders and spidering bots).
27Enlightenment No. 10
Robots work the same way humans dothey click
on hypertext links and follow them from file to
file.
28Enlightenment No. 11
If there is no hypertext link to a file on a web
server, a robot cannot find that file. Links
on your home page are your key to seekology
enlightenment
29Enlightenment No. 12
Even if a robot finds a file on the web, it may
not be able to parse (read) it.
30Enlightenment No. 13
Basic spidering robots can read ASCII. Only
the most advanced robots can read .doc, .xls,
.rtf, .pdf, etc.
31Enlightenment No. 14
Unless your web server publishes indexes of
files, any file that is not the target of a
hyperlink is invisible to robots
32Example of Enlightenment No. 15
This is how one brand of web server shows a file
index
33Enlightenment No. 16
The indexing software component of the search
engine parses files and stores keywords in a
database on the server.
34Enlightenment No. 17
Your interaction with the search engine is in the
form of a keyword search of the database, from
which it creates pages of hyperlinks to the files
that contain the keywords along with a brief
listing of what those files contain.
35Enlightenment No. 18
The robot and indexing software are designed to
pay special attention to text found within meta
tagged brackets in the header area of web
pages. ltmetagtinfo lt/metagt
36Enlightenment No. 19
Search Engines are not intelligent.
37Enlightenment No. 20
Search Engines are only as effective as the
organization of the global network allows them to
be.
38Enlightenment No. 21
When material is placed on your web, make sure
there is a clickable path to find it.
39Seekology 380 Optimization Strategies Beyond
the Primer
Enlightenments You Can Use on Monday.
40Enlightenment No. 22
Use either the web servers automatic indexing
system or a tool such as dir2html to create
hyperlinked indexes of files.
41Enlightenment No. 23
Publish in ASCII when possible.
This can include plain text, html, asp, php, or
other text-based coding
Advantages small, easily parsed, no plugins
42Enlightenment No. 24
Use META-tags abundantly for high-profile
documents.
META-tag Generators make this easy.
43Enlightenment No. 25
Use ALT attributes to describe graphics that
have valued context.
ltimg srckrebs-cycle.gif
altDiagram of Krebs Cyclesgt
44Enlightenment No. 26
JavaScript menus can mean dead ends to robots.
45Enlightenment No. 27
Deflect robots from your sensitive server areas
with the robots.txt file
User-agent Disallow /search Disallow
/groups Disallow /images
46Seekology Graduate School Seekology Secrets 5010
Big Secret No. 1
Anyone can deploy a Search Engine.
47Search Engine Anatomy
48How Its Done
49Tools
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